In a previous post, I provided an account of society S being required to be some way (or do some particular thing) W entirely in terms of more familiar requirements that participants (individuals, but perhaps also collectives that count as agents) do enough or do their part to help S realize W. In the comments, I noted that David Estlund provides something of a different account, in terms of: (a) participants being required to do their part to help S realize W, but only if everyone else does their part and (b) it being the case that S ought to be W (this being the evaluative use of ‘ought’, distinct from S being required to be W). I voiced some general sympathy with the need to include something like [b], while preferring my imperfect but unconditional agential requirements (that might well entail Estlund’s perfect but conditional agential requirements).

Here is a sketch of what I think is a better analysis: for S to be required to be W = (i) S failing to be W being indignation-worthy and because of this (ii) all participants being required to do something (or enough or their part) to help S be W.

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What does it mean to say that a certain institutional arrangement P in some society S ought (or is morally required) to be? Maybe that comes to this: S is required to come up with and implement a plan to achieve S. And perhaps that, in turn, comes to something like this: each individual and collective agent in society is required to make reasonable efforts, relative to role or position, to promote S (all of us collectively) coming up with and implementing a plan to achieve P. Different agents in different roles would have different more-specific requirements.

Is this kind of analysis standard? What are the alternatives?

If this analysis, or something very much like it, is right, there would seem to be some important results that I don’t think are always acknowledged in discussions of justice with regard to the basic structure of a society.

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Suppose that, for a certain type of cooperative endeavor in a certain type of circumstance, the only appropriate fairness-pattern (in the distribution of benefits and burdens) is equal shares of what is produced (as long as a certain minimum effort, of a certain minimal quality, is put forth). So, we do the thing, everyone crosses the effort/quality threshold, and we distribute the fruits of our labor equally. Is the distribution perfectly or completely fair or just?

Not necessarily. Maybe my contribution involved my unfairly acquiring something (say, wood for a fire that needed to be fed) from someone. Or maybe, though I traded fairly to get my wood, the person I got it from obtained it from some other person unfairly. The general pattern here (that need not involve anything like a chain of transactions a la Nozickian procedural justice) is: (social state of affairs) that-P is just only relative to the justice of (relevant social circumstance) that-Q; but it might be that, if that-Q is just, it is just only relative to the justice of (further relevant social circumstance) that-R; etc. Though there is no reason why this explanatory chain has to be super-long or super-complicated in all scenarios, at the level of evaluating whole societies and the complex interactions, norms and institutions that compose them, some considerable number of salient justice-evaluable circumstances and some considerable complexity should be expected. But that pushes us toward the idea that ideals of perfect or complete justice are unmanageable and quixotic.